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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are yearning and mourning associated with in black culture according to Gilroy?
(a) Anomie and world-weariness.
(b) Disorientation and displacement.
(c) Exile and terror.
(d) Revenge and nostalgia for home.

2. What is the aim of Chapter 6?
(a) To demonstrate the ambivalence toward 'tradition' in black communities.
(b) To cast tradition as something other than modernity's opposite.
(c) To describe the ways tradition has been harmful to the black experience.
(d) To narrate the he says that of tradition as a concept in the black experience.

3. What does Gilroy say DuBois often reminded blacks?
(a) That slavery was the worst thing people could suffer.
(b) That slavery was a finite stage in the development of the world consciousness.
(c) That slavery was worse than cultural collapse.
(d) That slavery was not the worst form of domination.

4. What did the struggle for black autonomy involve, for DuBois?
(a) Returning to black roots.
(b) Blacks helping blacks.
(c) Entrepreneurship.
(d) Social construction.

5. When did Richard Wright believe the western consciousness began to break down according to Gilroy?
(a) With the development of technology.
(b) With the beginning of the Renaissance.
(c) When religious understanding of the world collapsed.
(d) With the beginning of slavery.

6. What do Jews and blacks fear from a discussion of the Holocaust and slavery?
(a) Remembering.
(b) The lack of evidence from their familial histories.
(c) Confronting all the things that cannot be known.
(d) Loss of uniqueness.

7. When did DuBois experience himself as a Negro for the first time?
(a) In early childhood.
(b) When he bought another man's freedom.
(c) Listening to the Fisk University Jubilee Singers.
(d) When he asked to vote.

8. How does Gilroy say that Richard Wright saw capitalism?
(a) As a great liberator.
(b) As a form of liberation theology.
(c) As a messianic religion.
(d) As a destructive war.

9. What does Gilroy say tradition helps to do with regard to slavery?
(a) Transform its legacy.
(b) Cauterize its pain.
(c) Revise its effects.
(d) Avoid its memory.

10. What does Gilroy say blacks used to unify themselves?
(a) Art.
(b) Literature.
(c) Music.
(d) A political agenda.

11. What kinds of frameworks was DuBois trying to look beyond?
(a) Pluralist.
(b) Essentialist.
(c) Monotheist.
(d) Relativist.

12. What primary experience shaped violence in the black community according to Gilroy?
(a) Factory production.
(b) Capitalist exploitation.
(c) Slavery.
(d) Modern marriage.

13. What horrified Richard Wright in Gilroy's account?
(a) The history of blacks in America.
(b) Whites identifying with his black characters.
(c) Blacks criticizing his characters.
(d) Europeans taking his books as true indications of life in America.

14. How does Gilroy turn away from Richard Wright at the end of The Black Atlantic?
(a) He accepts that black experiences can resonate with non-blacks.
(b) He asks for a specifically American black culture.
(c) He proposes that art is a solution to tension between races.
(d) He calls for a new pan-Africanism.

15. What does Gilroy say slavery tried to do to tradition?
(a) Compete with it.
(b) Erase it.
(c) Rewrite it.
(d) Co-opt it.

Short Answer Questions

1. What kinds of stories does Gilroy say dominate black popular culture?

2. What did blacks symbolize for Richard Wright?

3. How does Gilroy characterize the mood of the black Atlantic?

4. How does Gilroy say blacks are different from Jews?

5. How does Gilroy say DuBois arrived at his identity?

(see the answer keys)

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